The Question of Being in Recent Japanese Phenomenology

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. Translated with an Intro- duction by Jan Van Bragt. Forward by Winston L. King. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. 317 pp.

This critique of the Western crises of theism and selfhood, by a former Japanese student of Heidegger's in Freiburg, may find a surprising kind of welcome in the West, when and if the methods of French post- structuralist criticism-in particular those derived from Jacques Derrida- begin to be employed in the . So suggests Emeritus Professor Winston L. King of Vanderbilt University in his forward to Keiji Nishitani's recently translated Religion and Nothingness. Incentives for such a remark are not hard to find in this book. They present themselves in the central thesis of its author, replete with suggestive nuances and repeated as so many variations on a single theme. The long-dominant Christian and Greek rationalist traditions of Western civilization, he says, have been irretrievably undermined by their own inherent logic, leaving a progeny of runaway technology and an irreversible drift toward . The threat posed by such nihilism cannot be overcome by a simple return to metaphysical affirmation, but only by means of playing out its own internal dynamism to its very end. The conquest of nihilism, indeed the single greatest task of , cannot be achieved by resisting nihilism, but only by embracing it and thinking it through. This requires dismantling the very foundations of Western metaphysics and theology, retrieving their underlying grounds, and thinking through the collapse of the tradition, the end of philosophy, the loss of'absolute center' (theo-centrism). In other words, the relative negations of these current crises (relative to metaphysical affirmation) must be passed through in order to assume the

281 282 required standpoint of absolute negation-what Nishitani calls "- ness'-which lies beyond the relative objectifications of both metaphysical affirmation and negation. While the entry into a discussion of such issues by a Japanese scholar may first strike one as a trifle incongruent, not to say offensive, the detachment from Western metaphysical preconceptions offered by one of such background may furnish a certain, regionally mediated universality of thought that may prove of considerable value. Furthermore, this particular volume by this particular scholar represents the latest work of the widely recognized doyen of the ' School' of , a school with a long and well-established oriental interest in the European phenomenological and existentialist movements. The father of the , Nishitani's teacher ( 1870- 1945), took an active interest in the phenomenological movement since its beginnings, sending students to study under Husserl and Heidegger; and it is not without significance, as J. L. Mehta has noted, that Nishitani himself wrote a long forward to two of Heidegger's lesser known addresses, or that his student, Koichi Tusjimura, gave the Festvortag at Heidegger's eightieth birthday celebration in Messkirch.1 Heidegger, in particular, had enthusiastic students in several decades before the West, outside of Germany and France, took notice of him. As early as 1927, the year Being and Time appeared, Kiyoshi Miki, a Japanese friend of Heidegger, was already publishing articles in Japanese on hermeneutical phenomenology. And it was another friend, Shuzo Kuki (cited by Heidegger in "Aus einem Gesprach von der Sprache," in Unterwegs zur Sprache), who introduced Heidegger's philosophy to Sartre and inspired him to study at Freiburg.2 The staggering number of Japanese entries in the Heidegger-Bibliographie by Hans-Martin Sass is nearly impossible to ignore, as well as the fact that Being and Time now has been translated into Japanese no less than five times.3 The reasons for this particular Japanese fascination with Heidegger and phenomenology, not altogether unrequited,4 may be found in the history of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. A movement nearly as difficult to define as the phenomenological and existentialist `move- ments,' the Kyoto School emerged at the State University of Kyoto under the original inspiration of Nishida, widely regarded as the leading philosopher of Japan since the Meiji Restoration in the mid-1800s. At that time, when the floodgates of Japan were opened to Western influence, Japanese intellectuals were suddenly confronted with the necessity of reconsidering their own traditions in light of new ideas from the West, falling heir overnight to two completely different cultures. By the 1890s German Idealism became the uncontested focus of interest